we broke 2.5 million last night at 8pm et, so the game will launch with an additional ship: the anvil aerospace gladiator (it's a bomber). ten lucky backers will get one for free.

we've broken the 750,000 stretch goal on kickstarter long ago, so now everyone who has backed gets a free repair bot.

there is a live chat feature that was added to the rsi website if you want to chat amongst your "star citizens".

finally, chris roberts will be answering questions again on reddit in 20 minutes from now (1pm et). i'll update with a link when it goes live (presumably he'll be there all day). get those questions ready!

I would love to get into this game, but if I do, I will never get out. Too many other interesting things in my life right now to split time with, least of which is Cub Scout leadership. Nobody, nobody told me how much work and fun it is.

Alright people, we are at the final 24 hours of this campaign! We currently stand at 4.75 MILLION dollars pledged, with 5+ million in our sights. If anyone wants to pledge, but hasn't done so yet, you can use a friend's referral link (here's mine) to get an extra 250 credits and a chance to win some swag. If you pledged on the kickstarter page, you can still enter to win. you'll be sent a survey at the end of the funding period asking if anyone recruited you (my rsi name is the same.. Cyco-Dude ). If you've already pledged on the rsi website and you want 250 more credits and a change to win some swag, click on the "your account" link at the top and enter my (or a friends, whatever) e-mail or user name into the referrer box. It's the last day to win some cool stuff; get it while you can.

Additionally, there are a number of limited-time add-ons as well as some other goodies, so check them out! I'm linking to the kickstarter post to take some load off of the RSI website. It's getting hammered right now, so please be patient!

You'll still be able to pledge after this initial crowd-funding is over. If you pledge now though, you'll be able to upgrade your pledge at a later date in case you really want something but don't have all the cash now. There will be a live-stream marathon going until the campaign is over; I'll update with the relevant links when everything goes live!

*UPDATE 2*pledge total of $6,225,582 as of 2:00pm et november 19th, with $2,134,374 coming from their kickstarter. they are having a grace period if you haven't pledged yet, or couldn't pledge during the last 48 hours of the fund raising period. you will be able to pledge (or purchase add-ons, or upgrade your current pledge) at the original tiers and prices until monday the 26th.

AAA publishers could have been raking it in if they hadn't pissed off the PC world with endless cookie-cutter rehashes, oppressive DRM, and an our-way-or-else approach to distribution and support. Star Citizen is as much a lightning rod for gamers' frustration with the state of the industry as it is an active development project--I'm certainly not the only one backing crowdfunds with what used to be my game budget.

I suspect it'll hit 60 before launch, which given SC's lean approach to marketing and overhead may actually translate to one of the largest development budgets ever.

I decided to jump on board tonight. I suspect it to be a fairly long and bumpy ride considering the final universe isn't supposed to be completed till end of 2016. However, I really like the idea behind the game. Hopefully they expand the world on the planets as well.

downloading now. maybe tomorrow after work I'll get to explore my hangar and take a spin in one of my ships.

Hopefully you've got a good graphics card, the hangar module bogged down my 650Ti and the final specs are supposedly even higher. I haven't got around to trying out dogfighting yet, as I'm more interested in exploration and the single-player experience.

NovusBogus wrote:Hopefully you've got a good graphics card, the hangar module bogged down my 650Ti and the final specs are supposedly even higher. I haven't got around to trying out dogfighting yet, as I'm more interested in exploration and the single-player experience.

Was fine on my 660. I think they've got a lot of optimization work to do still though.

I haven't gone into the dogfighting thing either for mostly the same reasons.

This is where the "PC gaming is dead" stories come from. The AAA publishers are screwing up and they're not getting the money anymore. Even the short-attention spanned-people who used to buy the rehashed sequels are being tempted away by tablet and smartphone gaming.

The money is still there in PC gaming, it's just going to a myriad of smaller companies that aren't big enough to be in the surveys that Gartner et al carry out to generate these figures in the first place. Steam is more successful than ever and the demand for better IGPs and the fact that they're selling well is a response to the fact that even "web/email/word" users want to do some casual gaming these days. When Intel's IGPs sucked, there was a huge market for better dGPUs and many even bough AMD's APUs despite the battery-life issues. 1st-gen Ultrabooks were a flop partly because they were too expensive and partly because they didn't have any graphics capabilities.

Some people ask me why I have always enclosed my signature in spoiler tags; There is a good reason for that, but I can't elaborate without giving away the plot twist.

NovusBogus wrote:Hopefully you've got a good graphics card, the hangar module bogged down my 650Ti and the final specs are supposedly even higher. I haven't got around to trying out dogfighting yet, as I'm more interested in exploration and the single-player experience.

Was fine on my 660. I think they've got a lot of optimization work to do still though.

I haven't gone into the dogfighting thing either for mostly the same reasons.

I tried the dog-fighting on my 560Ti and it was fine... Haven't tried multi-player yet, but the single player was fun to dip my toes into.. You may want to look into trying out the single player, since it took a little time for me to get used to..